From the article :
“Ever heard of Australian Women’s Forum? Neither had I until I recently stumbled upon the now-defunct magazine while researching for a story at work.
Launched in the early ’90s amid a landscape of riot grrls, grunge and sexually adventurous Gen-Xers, AWF was a female-friendly erotica magazine which folded in 2001, when the internet and increasingly tight censorship laws sent it to an early grave…..”It was all about women loving sex and that being perfectly OK,” Vnuk tells me. “It wasn’t, ‘You have to dress like this and do this and say this and then you can have sex’, which a lot of the mags at the time were.”
“In a lot of ways it was about what it wasn’t – it was like, ‘You don’t have to be any better than you are right now, you can just enjoy sex’. It was looking at hot guys, reading sexy stuff and then some more intelligent articles.”
The magazine, she says, was a voice for women who were unashamed about liking sex and men.
Regular sections included Studly, featuring real guys who sent their naked pics in, and Sex School, where real couples demonstrated sex positions. The erotic fiction section was called Wet Spot and a monthly feature called Body Talk showed real couples, photographed naked, talking about their bodies……
“We didn’t cop the flak that the men’s mags did,” Vnuk she says. “I suppose people thought it was good that we redressed the balance a bit. We were like, ‘Yeah, well, we see you as sexual objects too’.”
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